GHOSTING BRIAN BAKER
‘You say these constitute a Time Machine?’ The black box consisted of 16 objects and ephemera: (a) a prism; (b) a burned page from Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria; (c) a moebius loop inscribed with the phrase ‘Once Upon a Time there was a story that began’; (d) a Star Atlas; (e) a small black wooden maquette, in the shape of a box; (f) a reproduction of Alfred Jarry’s ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’; (g) a coverless copy of HG Wells’ The Time Machine that had been exposed to the elements for a long period; (h) a 1932 Austin Sixteen wiring diagram; (i) a kaleidoscope; (j) a series of 21 collages titled ‘Argo-0’; (k) an edition of Typographica magazine, dated December 1967: (l) a paperback copy of Peter Halliday’s How Grey Was My Valley; (m) a pamphlet titled ‘The Nelson Mandala’; (n) a facsimile of JG Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ from New Worlds 166, September 1966; (o) a CD-R of music titled Numbers; (p) a hardback copy of Richard Hamilton’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. The Director turned to Dr Baker and said, ‘You say these constitute a Time Machine?’
Signal to Noise Ratio. He rubbed his eyes. Too much screen time. Dr James Baker, former lecturer and now associate at the Institute, closed the laptop and leaned back in his chair. How much time had passed? How innocent he’d been. A world that had been much less full of screens, where cellphone masts were only then beginning to sprout like metallic weeds along country lanes. He’d trusted in the power of the printed page, then, a holy fool of the codex. Now, a stricken world lay etherised on a table of retina screens, plugged in and tuned out. He carried on amassing his library against the tides of digital information, walls of books enclosing himself and his family.
Ghosting. ‘Give me your definition of EVP’, said Rawley as he began recording on the DV camera. Even that object, sat atop its tripod, seemed vaguely obsolescent. Rawley, the maverick experimenter and magician, was collating a documentary, he said, on Electronic Voice Phenomena, the recording of voices imprinted on magnetic tape or digital media in seemingly empty space. With his mutton-chop whiskers and flared corduroys, Rawley presented himself like some media don from the early 1970s, commissioned from the ranks of OU lecturers to make a late-night tv feature on the occult. They sat in a featureless modern seminar room, wired for network connection, with the dry hum of the terminals and cooling fans dampening the ambient sound into a dry, flat, echoless space. There seemed little enough chance for ghost voices to be imprinted upon this recording, with the building just some five years old, but James waited a few moments, composing his thoughts before replying. ‘EVP is the conjunction between a tape recorder, an operator and an empty room’, he said.
Numerical Experiment. ‘Neurologically or psychologically, do you mean?’ Margaret Head smiled wryly at the near-lucid imaginings of her colleague who, once again, rolled out the blueprint of the wiring diagram and pointed out the nodes and relays of the circuit. ‘Do you see, Margaret’, Dr Baker said, his shock of white hair nodding over the blueprint, ‘how the transmission lines both anticipate the network of transmissions and etheric broadcasts we live in, and provide a map of the human brain?’ She nodded sympathetically. The poor man had become obsessed with schizophrenic art and ideas of influencing machines, and she wondered about his own mental health. Did he fear that he was being operated or taken over? Not a difficult thing to imagine these days, especially considering the state of the Institute.
Boundary Value Problem. ‘Tell me about it’, said Rawley as he pulled the car to a stop at a red light. ‘It started with dreams,’ said James. ‘A dream about a telephone call from my grandmother. She knew I was in trouble and called me. Of course, she’s been dead for fifteen years.’ Rawley gunned the accelerator as the light switched to green, and the old Mercedes growled as it jumped across the intersection. ‘In this dream, she gave me a code word. A word I could use when I was in danger or feeling unwell. I remembered the word when I woke up, unusually.’ Rawley smiled, visibly clicking through magical permutations, keys to James’s interior Rosetta Stone. ‘What was it?’ he asked. James grimaced, the light of the sodium streetlamps flickering across a rictus of remembrance. ‘I didn’t write it down,’ said James. ‘And now it’s lost.’
Iterative Image Restoration. The echo chamber of the heart is a delicate thing, thought Margaret Head as she walked along the echoing corridor of the Annex. Like the school she had attended as a girl, the Annex had been converted into an educational establishment from its first use as a hospital. This building had treated soldiers returning from the Western Front in 1915, and sometimes she thought she could hear echoes of the clatter of trolleys laden with surgical equipment, or the cries of men in the wards. Turning towards her office, she mused that many of the young men who studied at the Institute were of the same age as those who attempted to recuperate from their wounds, physical or emotional, in 1915. Back then she might have been Matron rather than a doctor, let alone the Director of the Institute. She smiled wryly to herself. Some echoes had to be dampened for hearts to heal.
Degradation Model. ‘That’s right’, said Benedict the artist-cyclist as he demonstrated to the audience his latest rackety device, a Tinguely-like object spliced with a bicycle, in the darkened lecture theatre. ‘If Dr Baker could come and help for a moment…’ Dr Baker left his seat and wandered into the light, the flickering projection of the early cycling films refracting from his strake of white hair. Benedict grinned mischievously as he took Dr Baker by the hand, led him to the device, and placed the Doctor’s finger on a metal lever to one side of the cube-like, two-wheeled frame. There was a breath of wind, and the projection stopped. The machine became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second, and was gone. ‘We all saw the lever turn. There was no trickery,’ said Benedict to the audience. ‘So where is the machine?’
How To Construct a Time Machine. As he sat in the garden, chickens at his feet and wife and daughter reading in the sun a few yards away, James wondered about the scene at the lecture theatre. Benedict, who he’d known for some years, had been unwilling to share an explanation for the disappearance of the machine, and had, in fact, processed from the stage in something like triumph. The whole thing was inexplicable, from the disappearance of the strange wheeled framework to Benedict’s elation, a man he’d known previously for his amused and enigmatic manner. Sitting in the sun, surrounded by birdsong and family, the scene was almost like a dream, or a memory over-illuminated by imagination. Had the machine ever been real?
Reverberation. James wrote: ‘Moorcock’s conception of the space and time of the city is represented in the form of Mother London itself. Just before the bomb lands for Josef Kiss to defuse, Beth and Chloe Scaramanga, whose canal-side cottage it descends upon, feel time standing still in the summer heat. They heard nothing from the gasworks, nothing from the canal, no traffic in Ladbroke Grove, no trains from the other side of the gasholders. […] Time itself might have stopped, save that Chloe, experimenting, saw her fingers move and knew that if she wished she could easily get up, while the lapping of the water from the canal meant that too was unaffected. Or was Time moving backward? This is the still centre of the novel, around which its structure revolves. Though the structure of the novel is concentric, it does not narrate time flowing linearly towards and from 1940. Rather, the events of the Blitz are like a stone dropped into the canal, and the ripples of its significance move forwards to the present and back again. Chloe, like ourselves, cannot be sure whether time is linear, is fragmented, has stopped, or is running in several directions at once.’
Impulse Response. The Director of the Institute, Margaret Head, sat at the back of the lecture theatre while Dr Baker paced compulsively in front of the console desk below, gesticulating while outlining his latest theories about transmissions and time travel. The radio microphone hissed and sputtered as he moved, his arms brushing the mic, but either he didn’t hear or took no notice. She was worried about him. Perhaps all he needed was a period of rest, a chance for the disturbed surface of his mind to become placid and calm once more. The tides of Dr Baker’s enthusiasms were galvanising but wearisome, and there was a curious tension in the lecture theatre that she couldn’t quite identify. The students’ attention was fixed on the pacing figure, but whether they were listening to him or wondering at him, she couldn’t be certain. Stray phrases came to the surface of her own attention as he pointed towards the screen, seemingly at random. But there was method here. After she clicked off the Dictaphone, recording evidence for or against him in some putative future hearing, she looked up and saw the final words projected onto the screen: ‘everybody can become an artist. But only if you tune into the right station.’
The Imaging Equation. JG Ballard’s book of ‘condensed novels’, The Atrocity Exhibition, rested broken-backed and wellthumbed in his hands as he waited in the cafeteria for Rawley to arrive. The tepid cup of green tea sat untouched on the Formica tabletop. James scanned the sparsely arrayed customers, everyone keeping their distance since the Event. Rawley slid through the open glass doorway and bopped, there was no other word for it, between the tables. ‘Ah, Ballard’, said Rawley, pointing to the novel. ‘You do know that you’re meant to take that book as a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual?’ James smiled painfully. He’d noticed his strange proximity to the ever-shifting ‘T’ character, though his obsessions were of a somewhat different character. ‘I have been thinking about billboards…’, he confessed. Rawley nodded and grinned as he sat down, and James watched the ripples in the surface of the tea expand, interfere, and still. Curious, Rawley asked, ‘Is there something in your tea, Doctor?’
Anechoic Chamber. Benedict took up the acoustic guitar and plucked a string percussively. The oddly metallic noise reverberated around the empty church, and as Benedict added harmonics, the space filled with frequencies resounding from its hard surfaces. The village church and its graveyard stood by the river, but the heavy oak door closed off the exterior sound-world. ‘Concert pitch?’ he asked. James stretched his legs in the end pew and stopped recording. ‘Only for a junkyard orchestra,’ he said.
Fourier Transform. The reported last words of Sir Isaac Newton, as pinned to the door of Dr Baker’s office: ‘I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’
Frame-Tale. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Dr Baker listened: (1) the voice recording of the female Soviet cosmonaut, made on 24 November 1963 by Achille and Gian Battista Judica-Cordiglia, cursing her superiors as she re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in a malfunctioning Soyuz capsule; (2) the ‘Russian Man’ numbers station broadcast in the 30m band, recorded on 27 September 2006; (3) the telephone call received by Alexander Graham Bell from his deceased brother Melville, on 10 December 1919.
Ripples in the Dirac Sea. Rawley wound himself into a riff. ‘I mean the novel White Noise, not the film. The Delillo novel. No, they’re not related. The film is an EVP story, yes, you’re right, but it’s not very interesting. The EVP investigator’s house was all red and brown, cluttered, old rugs on the floor, talk about a cliché! Tapes and video recorders all over the place, a computer, a DAT player, modern tech, but even they seem out of place. It’s like he’s heard voices through a crystal radio set in his front room. But anyway, the novel. Have you read it? There’s this catastrophe called the Airborne Toxic Event. Reading it now sends shivers up your spine. Anyway, it’s all about media, tv. Postmodernism. Before the internet and all that, way before, mid-1980s. The title, it’s a metaphor, signal to noise, how information gets swamped. Cybernetics. The Image. The main guy is an academic, professor of Hitler Studies. Yes, I know. He’s obsessed with death and meaning. Death is white noise. Oh. Actually, there is a relation to the film. Death and voices coming out of the white noise. If they’re there at all, if you know what I mean.’ He gripped his earlobe and tugged it, twice.
Additive Noise. A disquieting feature of the Time Machine exhibition was the marked preoccupation of the work with the theme of being lost in time, as if the artist and curator had sensed some seismic upheaval in the cultural landscape. As Margaret Head walked around the converted lock-up these bizarre objects, with their fusion of Duchamp, Wells and Konstantin Raudive, reminded her of the fossil Hunsrück slates she had studied in the Rhineland in her youth. They stood in the space like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play an unwilling and mystifying role.
Deconvolution. ‘Thank you, Margaret, for all you’ve done. I mean that,’ said James, sitting at his desk in the narrow, cell-like office in the Annex. The Time Machine box was packed in Styrofoam and wrapped generously in insulation tape. ‘It’s just a period of leave, James,’ she said, standing at the open door. ‘Come back after the summer, you’ll feel completely different about things.’ He smiled ruefully. Perhaps he had gone too far. Margaret had, he knew, protected him from the whispers of colleagues and management after the incident with the billboards, but the failure of his most recent experiment, either as an art project or as a temporal intervention, had made this moment inevitable. The echoes of the Event passed through his memory, the isolation and paranoia, the black hole at the centre of his being, the pulsing radio stars and the drive towards terminal silence.